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The anonymous poster who traced a Wikipedia edit on Rob Ford to the Toronto Star's corporate parent says he was just trying to get himself up to speed on the civic election.

"I was reading through some of the Wikipedia entries on the candidates because I wanted to get informed about the election," ES, who didn't want his name used, said in an interview.

The Star denied the IP address that made the edit is associated to the newspaper.

ES said he was surfing about on Aug. 5 when he noticed a link on mayoral candidate Rob Ford's Wikipedia entry, purporting to be "Rob Ford's Personal Blog," was actually a satirical website.

"It was basically set up to make fun of him," ES said.

"It is supposed to be official links related to Rob Ford," he said. "If you look at other people's Wiki pages, it generally doesn't list satire pages as official blog sites. It kind of struck a red flag for me. I was a little concerned because I don't want to see that for any candidate."

ES deleted the link, only the second time he's ever contributed to a Wikipedia article and then checked the history of who had added it to find the IP address. A check of that address showed it was related to the Star, although a spokesman for the newspaper denied any involvement.

"It is inaccurate, these allegations that we are editing Rob Ford's Wikipedia page," Bob Hepburn said.

Instead, Hepburn said the address is used by several other publications owned by Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd., including Sing Tao, Metro and the Metroland newspapers.

"We're trying to track it down, where specifically it came from," Hepburn said. "It may be impossible given the number of publications.

"We don't have a policy that firm but we would frown heavily on people going in and changing things in Wikipedia," he said.

Wikipedia describes itself as "the free dictionary that anyone can edit." But while it's assembled from largely anonymous contributors, every edit can be tracked on the site.

ES has now become a minor internet celebrity after he joined a discussion on torontoist.com about the changes.

The entry on mayoral candidate Rob Ford has had dozens of changes in the past month alone but the alterations in question happened July 16. ES noted the link's addition Aug. 5. It was reposted by the satirical site's author the next day and then deleted again.

That fake Rob Ford site itself was taken down a few days later after lawyers for the Ford campaign sent a cease and desist letter.

Fraser Macdonald, a spokesman for the Ford campaign, said lawyers are looking into the matter.

"We're trying to determine with 100% accuracy whether it was actually someone at the Star," Macdonald said. "We haven't made an official complaint to the Star and we're not specifically accusing them, at this point."

Rob Ford has already filed notice he intends to sue the Star over stories published earlier in the election campaign.